


Am I Born to Bleed?

by drosophilase



Category: Last Friday Night (Music Video)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 12:45:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/992155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drosophilase/pseuds/drosophilase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aaron finds that middle school is a whole new world for a lot of reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Am I Born to Bleed?

**Author's Note:**

> Krista and Allison are enablers. Also angels.

Elementary school is all about claiming a spot on the playground, using all bathroom breaks possible, and not losing conduct points.  Middle school, Aaron finds, is a whole new world.

He goes from having one teacher all day long to having to change classes every 45 minutes, struggling with the combination lock and sticky door of his locker no matter what he does.  No longer does he have to see the same 50 kids he went to school with from kindergarten— now there’s kids from 5 different elementary schools, new faces everywhere he goes.  And, most noticeably, his classmates go from chasing each other around the playground and passing notes with lots of hearts to actually holding hands, going to see movies on the weekends with money tucked into their hands from proud parents. 

It’s that part that confuses Aaron the most, the notes stuffed in lockers and book-holding and saving seats that seemed to come from  _nowhere_ _,_ how suddenly all his friends wanted to talk about were girls and their bodies, how the girl who sits behind him in history would tap on his shoulder just to ask for a pencil and then blush and giggle and say she found hers, thanks, as soon as he offered her one.

 

Aaron makes friends easily, especially with the kids from other elementary schools.  He meets a boy, Connor, in P.E. who isn’t too fond of basketball or running either, and tells him about video games he’s playing and thankfully doesn’t want to lewdly critique the shorts length of every girl in class.  The girl beside him in history, Allison, who rolls her eyes every time the girl behind him taps him on the shoulder, actually talks to him about  _history_ , and always partners up with him for groupwork and lets him “check his answers” against hers on homework and quizzes.  He finds out they have the same lunch period and he starts sitting at her table, feels nothing but relief when neither she nor Lindsay (her best friend from 5th grade on) giggle or ask him vapid questions.

When football season starts and Aaron’s older brother Mikey is the star running back of the high school football team, Aaron finds he gains a lot of friends rather quickly.  It’s strange, people knowing his name when he doesn’t know theirs, but he’s had years of watching his older brother bring a dozen friends over to watch a big game on TV and his older sister have huge sleepovers in the den— it’s good to know the gene didn’t skip him like he feared.  And it’s still easy for Aaron to make friends, and he finds that as long as he smiles and says “yeah” a lot, doesn’t say too much about reading or video games (other than Grand Theft Auto and Black Ops, which are widely accepted) they stick around, invite him to eat lunch with them, ask him to birthday parties.

Allison is in roughly the same friend group, but Connor isn’t, and it becomes even more noticeable as Christmas break gets closer than Connor and Aaron just have too much of a gap between them.  Connor invites him over on one of the last weekends of the semester, gives Aaron his cell phone number.  Aaron takes the number but edges out of the invitation and when the semester is over and they come back from Christmas— Connor doesn’t talk to him anymore, hangs out with another friend up on the bleachers while Aaron talks to Gray, one of the new extensions of the big group of friends he’s found his way into.  He stills says hi to Connor when they pass in the halls, still has his number sitting in his phone— still feels the nagging guilt that he did something awful every time Connor nods his head in acknowledgement of Aaron’s greeting.

But Allison doesn’t go away, still sits right next to him in history even when Coach Reynolds gives them the option to switch.  Aaron finds he likes spending time with her best of all, likes how she’s not afraid to roll her eyes when he says something stupid or argue him to the finish when they disagree (and, he’s usually wrong).  Aaron likes how she always values her friends over her crushes, never doodles names and hearts in her notebooks but writes Lindsay a page-long note every day, folded up in a complicated pattern to be slipped into a locker later.

It’s not long after Christmas break that Allison ends up coming over the two nights a month that the Junior League meets in Aaron’s house (his mom is the President, her mom the Secretary) and they do their homework and play video games and bicker in his room, sneaking finger sandwiches and punch upstairs while the meeting drones on.

Aaron wonders about Allison, looks at the Valentine’s Day decorations going up all over school and the increased numbers of couples clogging up the hallways and looks over at Allison during history, looks too much into the way she laughs and the way she touches him when she’s about to fall out of her desk to get her runaway pencil.  He watches the couples on his parents’ favorite late-night TV shows with a new outlook.

And then, one evening when he and Allison are holed up with no homework and watching one YouTube video after another and she’s laughing entirely too loud and he’s given up on shushing her, joining her in laying down giggling on the bedspread— he kisses her.

"What was that for?" Allison squawks, all business as she sits up, all laughter gone.

Aaron’s heart thumps hard— he doesn’t really have an answer.  ”I don’t know… isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?”

Allison huffs like she does when his homework is all wrong.  ”Aaron, we’re not _supposed_  to do anything.  You kissed me.  Did you want to kiss me?”

Running a fingertip over his lips, Aaron considers.  It hadn’t felt like much of anything really, not even as romantic as when he tried kissing his pillow for practice.  At least then he imagined lips that were enthusiastic about kissing back.

"No, I don’t think I did," Aaron says slowly, and Allison gives him her classic tired-of-your-crap-Aaron look, moving to lay back out on her stomach.

"Can we get back to watching cat videos now?"

He makes Allison swear not to tell, even though he knows she won’t, and he stays up late that night, wondering.  There’s not many times he’s felt like an outsider at school, having always had someone to eat lunch with and talk to after school and walk to class with— but something about seeing the couples around has made it where he can’t  _un_ see them, where he knows he’s staring but there’s just something he can’t figure out.  


And it’s that— he doesn’t want that.  He doesn’t have any girls that he wants to pass notes to or ask to the movies or hold books for in the hallway.  He doesn’t even want to hold Allison’s books, but maybe that’s mostly because she’d punch him in the arm for implying that she needs help to do so.  There’s girls he thinks are pretty and girls he likes to talk to and girls that are smart and arrogant and ditzy and everything in-between, and he doesn’t want to hold hands with any of them.

It’s not too much of a problem to cover it up, Aaron knowing from Gray’s cursory reaction when he said he didn’t have a crush (“Seriously? Are you blind? Did you see the tits on Jessica, I mean really!”) that he needed to have a standard answer ready to chime in when the subject of girls came up again, as it regularly did.

He didn’t give it too much thought over the rest of the school year, finally settling in to changing classes, finally getting his locker open consistently on the first try, at last having a pretty good handle on who to avoid and who he could trust.  Seventh grade was good to him for a lot of reasons, and he was looking forward to another year of middle school.  It suited him, he thought.

Allison never brought it up again and Aaron knew that made her his best friend.  She didn’t have to say anything for him to know he’d beaten Lindsay for the spot.

It’s not until the last day of school that he’s getting his yearbook signed in all his classes that he talks to Connor again, sees him in P.E. and doesn’t question his urge to get Connor to sign his yearbook.

Connor eyes him suspiciously but takes the book anyways, scribbling out something while Aaron writes an equally as short,  _Hey man, have a good summer.  P.E. was hell, only one more year of it! C ya._   He glances around the page and something white-hot ignites in his gut at the flowery pink handwriting, the hearts surrounding the signature, the word  _love_  written three separate times in the note.

"Are you dating Tiffany Brunson?" Aaron can’t stop himself from asking as they exchange books again, barely registering him tucking the ledger under his arm.

"Oh, um, yeah, I guess," Connor says distractedly.  "She really likes me, and she asked me out so I said yes."

There’s something— heavy in his voice, a reluctance that Aaron sickeningly recognizes from the similar feeling that lives deep in his heart of hearts.

"Oh. Good… good for you." Aaron says faintly, politeness winning over even as he takes two steps, looking away already for someone else’s yearbook to sign.

"Have a good summer, Aaron," Connor says, so quietly and sincerely that he looks back, but Connor’s already moved on.

He’s moved on in a lot of ways, Aaron knows.  And later, after the bell rings and all the lockers are cleaned out and Aaron nearly drops his yearbook when he sees Connor and Tiffany holding hands in the hallway, her shrieking and leading him out of the school while he manages a half-smile, Aaron wonders why it bothers him so much.

It takes him three days of wondering, re-reading Connor’s note in his yearbook _(P.E. wouldn’t have been the same without you.  Hope we have it together again.  See you next year, H.A.G.S.)_ and already bored with every video game in his cabinet. _  
_

On the fourth day, he wakes up with a raging boner that won’t go away and the crystal clear memory of Connor’s hand brushing his knee and Aaron can’t bear the answer to all that wondering in the face, but he knows deep down, it all makes sense now.

He jerks off quietly, biting his hand as he lets his mind wander where it’s been wanting to go all this time, pushing past the heavy guilt to the images of hands and eyes and muscled backs and arms that have been hovering right there, filed away for a private moment like this, and comes harder than he can ever remember into a tissue.  He actually can’t remember the last time he jerked off because he was thinking about something specifically, only when he can’t will a boner away with his own mind—

And then the guilt comes.  Thick and suffocating, he curls into himself, not even bothering to tuck in his now-soft cock and the realization of the truth makes tears roll sideways across his face and onto his pillowcase, staining dark circles.

He can’t be— there’s no way— he’s not—

 _Gay._   He finally forces the word out, and it cloaks him, makes him feel like he’s disappearing right into the mattress.  It’s there and undeniably true.

His mother calls him down for breakfast maybe hours later and he still hasn’t moved, has to loosen his limbs one at a time and crawl listlessly off the bed.  He washes his face but doesn’t look in the mirror, gets dressed with his eyes closed and stumbles downstairs, where the world has proceeded as normal, still spinning just as it’s supposed to.

"Aaron honey? Are you okay?" his mom says gently, and for a second he wants to just open his mouth and  _say_ it, just to see how it tastes on his tongue, what it feels like if someone else knows—

The guilt comes right on schedule, cloying and silencing.  He nods jerkily, sits down, and eats his toast and tries to push aside the stunning realization of who he is.


End file.
